The Great Teaching Swindle Swindle

The Channel 4 programme ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, broadcast in March this year caused a huge uproar, and rightly so. Its central ideas were that global warming is due to increased activity of the sun, and that even temperature data may not be correct. The programme contained many statements that were just wrong (1), misleading the audience, and convincing many, that man-made climate change is a nice big fat conspiracy.

I don’t need to go into the details of which bits were wrong, how interviewed people were misled, and the questionable track record of the director Martin Durkin (who likes to tell people who question him to go fuck themselves) (2, 10). This has all been done thoroughly and eloquently by more informed minds (3,4,5).

The film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, for which Al Gore got a Nobel Peace Prize recently (jointly with the IPCC), has been a major factor in increasing awareness of the issue worldwide since it was released in 2006. In early 2007, the secretaries for Education and Environment announced that a copy of the film would be sent to every secondary school in England (6). That really must have pissed off the global warming sceptics, and they weren’t going to let it happen without a fight.

The High Court case which followed, resulted in the Judge ruling that there were some errors in Al Gore’s film (7), and that the Government had to send out some guidelines accompanying it when sending it to schools. ‘Errors’ included Gore saying that melting ice in either west Antarctica or Greenland would cause a 20-foot increase in sea level “in the near future”. It is generally accepted this would happen, but over a period of millennia, not soon. The judge rightly said that this was alarmist (8).

But there is a bit of difference between errors like that, and the errors in ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, which included saying that volcanoes were responsible for more CO2 emissions than human beings (they are thought to be responsible for less than 2% of that from humans (9)).

In my opinion Al Gore got carried away and careless, but I don’t think the recognition of several errors in his film should overshadow the good work he has done for the cause, and luckily I don’t think this will happen. As Johann Hari, writing for The Independent, has pointed out, several of the ‘errors’ found by the judge were not errors at all – and it was, in fact, the judge who was in error (10).

But the ‘sceptics’ didn’t stop at the High Court. They have now decided to distribute their own material to schools in the UK (11), including ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ a well as another film of climate change denial ‘Apocalypse No!’ (inspired title I thought) which, according to Lord Monckton, is going to be reviewed by scientists before it is given out. How considerate and sensible of them. Pity they couldn’t have done the same before they broadcast the swindle. Of course, they will claim that all they are doing is presenting the other side of the argument.

There is still a group of people in the world that thinks the earth is flat (12). One day Martin Durkin and co. will be thought of in the same category, but as long as they are allowed to deliver their agenda to the masses there is always going to be a section of society that believe them. The fight to minimise the effects of climate change would not be easy even if everyone was trying to help, but this is making things even harder, and it needs to be stopped.